Ivory invests in AI for Education

Ivory has a legacy of being one of the pioneers in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has been experimenting with AI since the past 15 years.

AI is transforming several industries, and why not education? While Education is support to provide a fundamental base for the students, institutions and faculty are often quite reluctant to change themselves. Whether it is superiority, holier than thou, or plain lethargy, complacency is not something that will help anyone.

Many institutions are really slow to adopt change. They are also busy in their own squabbles and politics. However, students are finding traditional education more and more irrelevant. It is evident from poor attendance and enrollment in several business schools, and even poorer completion ratio of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) and SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses).

While suppliers, armed with venture funding, are busy spamming users using social media, search engine marketing and other marketing tools to market good for nothing programs by these fuddy duddy institutions and courses, the students are finding it extremely frustrating to deal with them. Overall standing of the institutions and online courses are falling due to these rampant promotions without investing in conducting relevant programs.

The industry has a variety of players such as content providers, platform providers, assessment providers, marketing partners and academic institutions. All of them need to go through a transition in order to transform themselves with the new digital education.

With the increasing computing power available, AI can be used to bring in personalization and analytical tools to make education more relevant. It will also save time and resources for doing redundant manual tasks.

A critical element of evaluation is important for any program to succeed. It is unbelievable to see some institutions not even incorporating any kind of evaluation in courses, or just limiting themselves to basic testing. Prof. Vina Vani, one of the global leaders in the area of Data Analytics, exemplifies use of evaluation to build successful programs. Her programs have continuous assessment, and the students get enough skills to do their own projects at the end.

Ivory is working towards using Artificial Intelligence to offer education using automated conversational tools. It has already built virtual personal assistants that continuously engage the students. It has also built simulation tools for immersive learning. It has also built tools for formative assessment.

Kapil Rampal, Managing Director, Ivory Education sent out an open invitations to all national and international institutions to join Ivory in this endeavor. It is set to benefit all stakeholders and build tools for the future. It will also help faculty members use their time efficiently and institutions to use their resources appropriately.